by Bill Gaston
“Good,” he says. “You found one.”
“You’re not drinking?”
“Actually,” says Jay, “I’m fasting.”
“Because of . . .”
Jay turns to me, eyes full of energy. His hair needs washing but he looks sturdy as can be.
“Yup,” he says. For a moment I’m worried he isn’t going to say any more. But he does. “I’ve been reading lots about it. It actually might help. Fasting burns your fat and your toxins first, and then it does tumours at about the same time it does muscles. Then it does organs — you don’t want that, so you have to stay on top of it.”
I tell him I didn’t know any of this.
“It’s one thing you can do. It’s easier than one of those special diets.” He gives me a half-smile. “Fasting you don’t have to do anything at all.”
I’m sweating, it’s hot, my beer is already gone. It’s the perfect situation for a cold can of beer and my middle has warmed up and spread with that first little bliss. It must be eight o’clock but it’s the longest day of the year, the solstice, and feels like afternoon. On the phone Jay had mentioned the solstice and said the evening would be “exactly perfect for launching.”
“So what do they say? The doctors.”
“Not much. It’s still early.”
“Well, I mean, when did you find out? And . . . You know — what’s going on with it?” It’s hard to come out and ask, Are you going to die? Or, How much time?
“Well it’s not exactly official yet. Not ‘confirmed.’”
“I mean are they sure it’s cancerous and all that?”
“Well, no, but it is.”
I relax at this. Jay might not even have cancer. We can relax this evening and maybe I can get Jay to have a good time.
“So you don’t really know.”
“No. I know.”
“How?”
Jay gives me another half-smile and raised eyebrows. “How do we know anything?”
He turns and glides the long, air-light bag over to the table as if it were a ghost. I tell him I’m amazed he’s remembered. We’d tried this when we were perhaps fifteen.
“It’ll work this time,” he says. “I’ve got it figured out. I made this hoop thing.”
He lifts his hoop, made of curved balsa wood the width and thickness of a toenail, formed to fit the big mouth at the bottom of the bag, maybe two feet in diameter. He tosses it up and catches it, showing me it is light yet strong, a hoola-hoop for faeries. He points to the white candles and tells me he timed one and they burn an inch a half-hour. So it’s my job, he says, to cut eight one-inch candle stubs. A small fine-toothed saw lies beside the candles. It’s a job he could’ve done himself in two minutes. So he’s been thinking of ways to include me.
“I’ll get on it,” I tell him, flipping my can into a blue recycling box as I go inside for another. I haven’t asked him why he’s doing this silly UFO thing. Only when my hand is on the fridge handle do I see that this might be exactly what a guy with a brain tumor might do.
I return as Jay ties, with thread, two strips of balsa to the hoop so they cross at the middle. This cross will carry my candle stubs. Another job he gives me is to stick the stubs to the wood with a few drops of melted wax. My headache still flirts so I’m glad to be using my hands.
“It screwed up last time because remember we had only the one strip,” Jay tells me. I have no recollection whatsoever. That night, so long ago, also probably involved beer. I do recall a few of us launching something that caught fire right away, the plastic shrivelling and burning instantly. I think I remember it burning with no sound.
“Great,” I say, probably unconvincingly because Jay goes on to explain that the reason it burned last time is because the candles were too close to the bag, “and boom,” he says. “This time we can huddle them all in the middle.”
“Sounds good.”
Jay does look like he’s lost some weight, but I don’t know if brain cancer is one that does that.
“I thought of this after hearing about the Japanese balloons in World War Two. You ever hear about those? That they launched at us?”
I hadn’t.
“They launched thousands. Hot air balloons. Unmanned hot air balloons that carried sort of these gas firebombs. The plan was to have them hit all over the West Coast, start all these forest fires, and burn up all the western forests.”
“Why?”
“They had altimeters and if it got too low it’d drop a sandbag and gain altitude again. One man in Oregon was killed getting hit with a sandbag. He was the only casualty of the Second World War on the North American continent. Did you hear about the Japanese sub that shelled Vancouver Island, they think it was aiming at a lighthouse, but it missed?”
I tell him I don’t know if I’ve ever heard any of this. “So are you going to be going in for more tests?” I ask him.
“MRI in two months.”
“That’s a — ?”
“Brain scan.”
“That’s a bit of a wait,” I tell him. But if he has one scheduled at all, there must be something to this.
“Actually they wanted to do it next week. I got them to delay it, so I could fast.”
“Ah ... Why?”
“Have to give the fast time to work. Now it’ll be gone, cured, vanished when they scan it. It’ll look like nothing was ever there.”
“That’d be great. But, you know, then you won’t know if you ever even had something.”
He doesn’t look at me this time and softly says, “I have something.”
I saw candles into one-inch stubs. Soon my shoes are covered with a wax dust, which looks like confectioner’s sugar on two chocolate loaves. Jay tells me to shave a stub down a bit more and I do. I’m not sure why I don’t believe in his tumour. Jay was always the first guy in our group to do anything. He would laugh at this little funny but I don’t want to try it on him unless I can slide it into the conversation, which now wanders paths of gossip about other old friends. But if anyone knew they had a tumour without really knowing, it would be Jay. He was the guy who knew things. He was the guy who had us all try this vitamin I can never remember the name of, that made you flush red in the face and everything went pins and needles, and Jay said if you didn’t have that reaction it meant you had at least mild schizophrenia. He was first with everything. When we were sixteen he got hold of a bottle of absinthe and he described its properties and history while the rest of us passed it around and guzzled. He was the first one to get a car. He was also the first one to quit drinking for a while, and get a mountain bike, and eat healthy food, and experiment with getting in shape. In the last ten years or so I haven’t seen him much and you hear rumours about this and that, but I can sum up Jay for myself by remembering him as the guy who, while the rest of us stumbled along a snowy trail in the dark, halfway up Cypress Mountain, looking for Rooney’s cabin, Jay stopped with genuine excitement and pointed to the stars on the horizon and wouldn’t let us go until we all saw the rare comet. It was hardly visible he said, and I only pretended to see it, but the main point is that Jay knows a lot about a lot of things, and I have to say I’ve never known him to be wrong. Maybe even about a guy getting killed by a Japanese sandbag in Oregon.
“Try tipping it upside down,” Jay tells me.
I turn the hoop-cross over and only one candle stub falls from the balsa wood. We light a candle and drip a few more drips and get it stuck on properly.
“Remember Rooney’s cabin?” I ask.
“I remember your puke hole in the snow.”
“Fine.”
“How’s Pam doing?” he asks, casually as can be.
“Long gone,” is all I say.
“Sort of heard that. Divorce too, right?”
“Totally.” I think, enough of this.
“You with anyone else?”
“Not to my knowledge.”
“Not tossin’ the dogwater to anyone in particular?”
I have to smile
, “toss the dogwater” being Rooney’s term for sex, something we haven’t heard in more than twenty years. Decent memory, Jay, for a brain tumour.
Jay carefully fits the bag opening around the hoop, a tube of Crazy Glue at the ready. Crazy Glue scares me. The stories of eyelids glued shut and needing surgery, practical jokes involving faces stuck to frying pans and such.
“Imagine having no eyelids,” I offer.
“You’d want to be back in before sunrise.”
“You would.”
“So you’re not with anybody,” Jay persists.
“Nope.”
“Nobody on the horizon?”
“Not even over the horizon.”
“You still looking?”
“Is this, like, a talk show?”
I think I meant “encounter group,” but you go with what comes out. I’m reminded that Jay can get pushy. I wonder again about brain tumours and decide I will only be nice. Plus the three beers are done and I’m going to ask him to please ask a neighbour for some. I hate using taxis for booze runs and in any case I’m not sure I have the cash.
“I’m just wondering if you’re unencumbered,” he says. “I have sort of a proposition.”
Who knows where this is going — I’m a little nervous now.
Jay is minutely dabbing glue to the outside of the hoop and pressing plastic bag hard to the wet spot. He looks practised at it.
“Well, so the thing is, why I called, and what I’m looking for —”
“First? Jay? I could really use another beer. This is sort of my night out.” I’m using any leverage I have, considering I might soon be losing it. “I was wondering if maybe you have a neighbour who’s a buddy and might have a spare something lying around? That I could replace?”
Jay looks at me thoughtfully. I’m thinking one pupil is a little larger than it should be. He looks a bit like David Bowie, and I don’t think he used to.
Jay drops his gaze and appears to appraise his feet.
“Seeing as it’s your night out, I think I can find something. Georgio over there makes his own and has a million bottles stashed downstairs.” The half smile. “He’s actually glad when someone likes it. Keeps your glass topped up.”
Jay settles the bag and hoop onto the table in an orderly pile and heads down his drive. He asks back over his shoulder, “Red okay?”
“See if you can get two or three,” I tell him, not too ashamed of myself, watching him cross the street and then the neighbour’s lawn. He walks like he’s always walked. Who knows.
I don’t know what I thought Jay’s proposition might be, but it’s weird enough.
“I’m looking for a housemate,” is what he says. “Maybe a helper.”
“A helper.”
“If this fast doesn’t work. If nothing works. If it gets bad and I can’t do certain stuff.” The smile again. “Might need some help.”
Jay’s finished gluing the bag to the hoop and I’m settling in with some wine, which I believe is very good Italian, though I may just think that because I know the maker’s name is Georgio. But it’s rich and robust for homemade. It’s Jay’s fault that I’m drinking it from the bottle. When he lugged the four bottles up the drive (Georgio in his front door waving to me from across the street), he asked if I wanted a glass or just wanted to drink it straight from the bottle, taunting me for what he takes to be my desperation. So I called him on it and said no glass was required. Then I one-upped him and grabbed a screwdriver, hammered it with a chunk of firewood, drove the cork down, took a good slug, wiped my mouth on my wrist, and pronounced the wine “acceptable.” I can get contrary when people accuse me of drinking too much. I’ll use a corkscrew and wineglass for the next bottle.
“Don’t they have people for that? ‘Helping professionals?’” I ask him.
“Christ, who has the money?”
“I guess they’re pricey.”
“You wouldn’t believe it.”
It looks like our UFO is ready when Jay glues shut the little hole at the top of the bag where the hanger-hook goes through. What we have is an inflatable bag about five feet tall and three wide, at the bottom of which is a light frame holding eight candles, which will be lit, and fill the bag with hot air, and cause it to float, up, up over the neighbourhood, which will be able to see only a cluster of unidentifiable lights moving in the sky. That’s the theory, anyway, our only other UFO having burned, twenty-five years ago, before it left the ground. I notice how tricky it’s going to be to get the candles lit.
“We should put this pooch in the air,” I suggest.
“Let’s give it fifteen minutes.” Jay stands, hands on hips, gazing into the evening sky. It’s just past sunset. “I want it to be exactly right. When it’s sort of a darker purple.” He nods toward the horizon.
“How do we get these candles lit?”
Jay explains that the vacuum cleaner there in the corner will blow the initial hot air into the bag, filling it, keeping it away from the candles, which will then be lit “with teamwork and surgical co-operation.”
He asks me what I think. About what, I say. He says that part of the deal would be me getting free room and board because of the eventual “helping” part.
“What if you don’t get sick and no helping takes place?”
“We’ll have to see how that goes. Even by the end of this fast, I’ll need someone to cut the grass and stuff. Anything heavy. Plump my pillow.”
“You’ve thought this out.”
“Have to.”
“So I guess you’re asking me to move in.”
“That’s why I wanted to know if you’re with anybody.”
“When do I have to let you know by?”
“Soon as possible. I need to find somebody. I just thought of you yesterday and called.”
I decide not to be stung by this. I ask, “Who knows if we’ll start slapping each other over what kind of Campbell’s soup to have every night.” Jay’s checking his fingers for glue, nodding. I add, “I mean, we haven’t hung out for a while.”
He points his chin at his house. “It’s bigger than it looks. We can pretty much avoid each other if we want.” He looks to a corner of the carport. “There’s a TV in that box. It’s only twenty inches but we could each have our own TV.”
“So why me?”
Jay meets my eye soberly. Maybe I want some sort of declaration about friendship, about the magic trust of knowing a person since kindergarten.
“I dunno. I guess because you can.”
“Because I can.”
“Because you’re free. Wife. House. Kids. I went down a list of people.” He smiles, but sadly. “There’s hardly anyone as free as you, man.”
I wonder how much Jay knows. What the gossip is. Why I left that last job. Why I no longer drive a car. How what might look like self-destruction has been a case, a long case, of bad luck. I firmly believe that depression is bad luck. Who it hits and who it doesn’t hit and how long it stays — who has control over that? Does he know how I tortured and then killed a beautiful life with Pam?
“And I really have to ask you one thing,” Jay says. “Can I get personal?”
I shrug as if to say “obviously,” though we never have gotten personal, unless we did one day in kindergarten.
“No judgement, okay? But I have to ask you straight out.” He raises his eyebrows at the bottle I’ve just put on the table, dented cork resting in the quarter-inch of wine that’s left.
“Okay.”
“So, I have to know, is every night your ‘night out’? I mean I have to know, if you’re helping me. I have to know if you’ll be reliable.”
“It’s a fair question.” And it’s one I’m not sure how to answer, seeing as the truth is the only answer possible, and seeing as every night for the past while has indeed been a sort of night out.
“Don’t mean to pry, but obviously it’s something a guy — a fifty-pound bald guy — will need to know.” He smiles and I smile back, grateful he’s turne
d it into a joke, which he continues. “You know, like if the garbage is never going to be taken out and it’s going to be Led Zeppelin at two in the morning.”
“It’ll be the Rolling Stones.”
“That’s a little better.”
“But four in the morning.”
We’re both smiling pretty good though Jay’s eyes are still focused on a spot in space exactly between us and he’s waiting for my answer. I wonder if he knows he’s giving me an opportunity. Then I wonder if it was part of his plan.
“I’d be reliable,” I tell him, making myself meet his eye.
He nods. “I sort of knew that.”
But I tell him I need to chew on it and I’ll let him know before I leave tonight.
“Well, if you leave,” he jokes back.
Not long after sunset, I’m sipping superb Italian from a crystal glass. Jay uses the vacuum’s ass to fill the bag and we gently guide it, half-floating, into the backyard. Both armed with a long, decorative fireplace match we light the candle stubs and it’s indeed a surgical procedure to get all eight lit without touching flame to plastic film and ending it in an instant. In this windless dusk, as the bag rises slowly from Jay’s weedy backyard, and moves even more slowly, almost unnoticeably, to the west, over the next house, I remark that the light is perfect. Jay was right, it is a perfect dark purple now, and in its royal deeps the bundle of eight identically glowing lights is a mystery and a splendour.
Jay turns to me. “What?”
I’ve mumbled something and I now realize what.
“You know Pam, right?” I ask, and he nods. “She loved soccer on TV and used to say the guys looked like gods. At the end once when they’re taking off their shirts and trading them, and Pam has her eyes hanging out, I said, ‘The gods take off their shirts.’ And after that, when something is perfect, really perfect, it’s what we say. A perfect sports car, or prawns in garlic and butter the waiter puts under your nose, we announce, ‘The gods take off their shirts.’”
“That’s pretty good,” says Jay.
“We had a few good things.”
He says it’s great that we had a few good things. We watch our candle-bag rise and float a little farther away, its speed not discernable. I voice my worry about it maybe coming down and landing on a wooden house. In Oregon, I joke. Jay assures me it won’t and I believe him. He turns to me and asks if I know what will happen and I say no. We’re standing almost touching shoulders, and it’s as intimate as we’ve ever been. He turns to me in this light and his laugh lines and wrinkles are cut deep. He looks very old, almost instantly, maybe it’s the night, but it’s a shocking change in the Jay I know, though I also understand that my face is doing exactly the same to him.
